Chicago's Budgeted Positions Vs. Its Actual Payroll, File By File

How many people does Chicago plan to pay? The mayor’s 2026 budget proposal answers by title, line by line, in a file with no names: 27,924 annually budgeted positions across 39 departments, plus work the city budgets by the hour (3,241,714 hours) and by the month (794 months) — three units this page never adds together, because the file’s own unit column says they are different things. Read it beside the city’s employee file from August 2026 and the two records disagree in a specific, checkable way: the proposal budgets 13,727 police-department positions; the employee file lists 12,181 people there — 1,546 fewer, eight months into the budget year. And one line most readers would not guess: the largest single budgeted salary in the proposal belongs to the Commissioner of Aviation, $350,000 — above the police superintendent’s $284,016 and well above the mayor’s own $221,052. The proposal is a plan and the roster is a payroll snapshot — two documents with two dates — and this page keeps them side by side rather than pretending either one is the other.

Budget – 2026 Budget Recommendations – Positions and Salaries (wd4x-2xf8), 8,235 title rows, retrieved August 24, 2026 · Employee file aggregate as of August 14, 2026 (31,768 rows) · the positions file is the proposed budget, not the adopted ordinance

Three units the file refuses to let you add

Sum the file’s unit column naively and you get 3,270,432 — a number that means nothing, because the column mixes positions with hours and months. The file labels each row’s unit, and read that way it is clean:

Source: Budget – 2026 Budget Recommendations – Positions and Salaries (wd4x-2xf8), retrieved August 24, 2026. Units are as the file labels them and are not comparable across rows of different types.
Budget unit	Title rows	Budgeted units	Budgeted dollars
Annual (positions)	7,529	27,924	$3.11 billion
Hourly (hours)	615	3,241,714	$746.2 million
Monthly (months)	91	794	$55.9 million

The dollars total $3.91 billion across the three unit types, and that total includes money without people attached: 961 rows — Fringe Benefits, Schedule Salary Adjustments, prevailing-rate wage increments — carry $104.2 million in budgeted dollars and exactly zero budgeted units. That is the file being honest in its own way: the position counts on this page are clean because those rows count themselves out.

Budgeted beside filled, department by department

The city’s employee file — a different record, published as a roster snapshot and read here as of August 14, 2026 — lists who is actually on the payroll. For the ten departments whose names match cleanly across the two files:

Sources: wd4x-2xf8 (proposed positions) and the city’s Employee file as read in our roster analysis (retrieved August 14, 2026). Ten departments with exactly matching names; the two files carry different dates and different definitions and are not combined.
Department	Budgeted annual positions (2026 proposal)	Budgeted hours	On the employee file (Aug. 14, 2026)
Police Department	13,727	133,235	12,181
Fire Department	5,137	—	4,779
Dept. of Aviation	1,217	389,579	1,978
Dept. of Water Management	414	1,403,062	2,053
Dept. of Transportation	364	468,970	1,274
Public Library	851	358,501	1,088
Office of Emergency Management and Communications	854	203,599	878
Dept. of Streets and Sanitation	347	126,646	1,973
Dept. of Fleet and Facility Management	197	825	874
Dept. of Public Health	757	5,912	590

Two patterns sit in that table. Where the hours column is small, the employee file runs below the budgeted positions — police at 12,181 against 13,727 budgeted, fire at 4,779 against 5,137. Where the hours column is large, the employee file runs above the annual-position count — the library lists 1,088 people against 851 annual positions, water management 2,053 against 414 — because those departments budget much of their work by the hour (water management alone carries 1,403,062 budgeted hours), and the people doing hourly-budgeted work appear in the employee file without appearing in the annual-position count. The gap is real in both directions; what it is not is a measured vacancy count. A proposal from October and a payroll file from August are two documents, and the space between them holds hiring, attrition, and every amendment the Council made in between — none of which either file records.

One title is 31 percent of the plan

The proposal spreads 27,924 annual positions across 1,267 distinct titles, and one title dwarfs the rest: Police Officer, 8,719 budgeted positions — 31 percent of every annually budgeted position in the city’s government — at an average budgeted rate of $110,620. The next largest titles are also uniformed: Firefighter-EMT (1,587), Sergeant (1,411), and detectives (1,292). The biggest civilian block appears far down the list. A budget is a statement of intent, and the intent in this file is unambiguous about what kind of employee the city mostly plans to be made of.

The salary ladder’s top rung is at the airport

Among rows that budget an actual position, the highest single budgeted salary in the 2026 proposal is the Commissioner of Aviation at $350,000. The Superintendent of Police is budgeted at $284,016; the Mayor at $221,052. So the proposal’s pay ladder puts the person who runs O’Hare and Midway $129,000 above the person who runs the city — a fact the file states without comment, and which this page passes along the same way. (Grant funds carry $187.2 million of the file’s $3.91 billion; the rest is budgeted to local funds.)

Questions this file can answer

How many positions does Chicago’s 2026 budget carry? The proposal budgets 27,924 annual positions, plus 3,241,714 hours and 794 months of work budgeted in their own units — the file does not state, and this page does not compute, a single combined headcount.

Is the city employing as many people as it budgeted? The two files this page reads cannot settle that in one number. For police and fire — departments budgeted almost entirely in annual positions — the August employee file runs 1,546 and 358 below the proposal. For hourly-heavy departments the comparison inverts, because hourly work does not appear in the annual-position count at all.

Who has the highest budgeted salary? The Commissioner of Aviation, $350,000 — above the police superintendent ($284,016) and the mayor ($221,052), by the proposal’s own pay-rate column.

How we counted

Source: the city’s Budget – 2026 Budget Recommendations – Positions and Salaries file (wd4x-2xf8): 8,235 title rows across 39 departments and 1,267 distinct titles, with no employee names. All aggregates computed server-side on the portal and re-checked; retrieved August 24, 2026. The file is the mayor’s proposed budget as introduced; the adopted appropriation ordinance is a separate document and can differ.
Units: every count on this page keeps the file’s own unit labels. Annual rows count positions; Hourly rows count hours; Monthly rows count months. The three are reported separately and never added, converted, or turned into full-time equivalents.
Allowance rows: 961 rows carry budgeted dollars and zero budgeted units (Fringe Benefits, Schedule Salary Adjustments, prevailing-rate increments) — $104.2 million included in every dollar figure and excluded, by the file’s own zeros, from every position count.
The roster cross-read: department-level counts from the city’s Employee file as computed in our roster analysis (retrieved August 14, 2026; 31,768 rows). Only the ten departments whose names match exactly across the two files are compared, and the comparison is shown side by side — the files differ in date, purpose and definition, and no number on this page mixes them.

Computed by KCM Desk from the city’s 2026 budget-recommendations positions file and its employee file, retrieved August 14–24, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.